


Touch Starved

by Aelia_D



Category: Original Work
Genre: Anxiety, Depression, Exophilia, F/M, Personification of Famine, Reader-Insert, Skin Hunger, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-03-13
Packaged: 2019-11-17 13:04:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18099065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aelia_D/pseuds/Aelia_D
Summary: You've been alone in your apartment too long. When you finally go out in search of a donut, and possibly some company, you are shocked to find yourself speaking to the personification of Famine.





	Touch Starved

_Happy birthday!_ The email reads.

 _What?_ You think to yourself. You open the calendar app on your phone and you frown. No, it’s not your birthday. But it almost is.

How is it nearly your birthday?

Where has the time gone?

It’s with something of a shock that you realize you haven’t spoken to another human face-to-face in over month. You work freelance gigs online, and get paid through direct deposit. You order your groceries online through a delivery service, and once the delivery person has deposited the bags outside your door, you collect them. You even pay your rent and other bills on the internet. Your mail gets delivered through a slot in the door.

You didn’t  _plan_  to find yourself secluded like this. You look around your tiny studio apartment. Your full-size bed, with the flannel sheets and the fluffy comforter is a mess, and you know you’ve spent more time there than you should have recently, fighting off the depression that’s been swamping you. It makes it hard to get up. Hard to shower. Hard to care.

 _I should go out and get something_ , you tell yourself.  _Maybe a coffee, and a donut, and I can speak to other people. It would be good for me_ , you think.

So you pull on clothes you haven’t worn for three days, you run a comb through your hair and pull it into a ponytail and you wash your face. You look at yourself in the mirror. Maybe you aren’t looking your best but you don’t look like someone who’s been fighting the twin demons of depression and anxiety, either.

At the corner across from your apartment building there’s a cafe. You can see it from your desk and you sometimes watch people working in there. You used to go down there to work sometimes, as part of your routine. You wonder, idly, when that routine slipped.

It doesn’t matter though. Now that you realize how long it’s been since you’ve even nodded cordially to one of your neighbors in the hall, you feel like you  _need_  to see another person, to speak to another person. Your hands twitch, as you imagine holding hands with someone, and the need to feel someone hug you overwhelms you.

You miss your friends, but since you got out of school all of you have sort of drifted apart. It’s… hard being alone like this. But you moved to this city for the opportunities, and you’re doing okay for yourself. You’re paying your bills on your own, and you’re… well… not doing great, if you’ve been alone in your apartment for over a month and nobody noticed.

This train of thought is enough to get you to the cafe, and to the point where you’re standing in line. A person brushes past you to grab their coffee, and it’s like an electric jolt to your system, to have them touch you like that. Even that briefest brush is… surreal. You don’t know what to do with that information, and it’s like your body can’t quite process it.

It’s almost too much, but you’re here, and you’re going to see this through.

“A medium mocha please, and a chocolate old fashioned donut,” you say, when you get to the cashier. Thankfully your voice isn’t awful, and the person working the register seems kind when they smile at you.

In no time at all, your order is done. You slide into a seat near a window, and glance around. Nervously, your fingers scrape at the seam of the paper cup. There are a few people clacking away at laptops. A few people sitting and chatting, a few others reading. It’s not busy, but it’s alive and you didn’t realize how much you missed this.

As your gaze skims over the crowd, you find it catching on the empty seat near the door. It’s weirdly dark there. You make yourself look away, but again your gaze drifts back, only… that seat’s not empty. There’s someone there.

A strangely gaunt man with haunting eyes is staring at you, his head cocked to one side. He seems puzzled. You glance behind you, but there’s nothing going on there that should cause him this kind of confusion.

Well, you’d come out for human interaction, and here he is staring at you so you’re going to take the opportunity that fate has dropped into your lap. With quick, decisive strides that you hope hide how nervous you are, you cross the short distance from your table to his, and slide into the seat across from him.

“Hi,” you say. And that’s when you see a dark horse standing outside the window. Has it been there this whole time? “What… is that?”

He glances from you to the horse, turning in his seat with a fluidity you wouldn’t expect. When he looks back at you his brows climb even higher, which you hadn’t thought was possible on his strangely gaunt face. Now that you’re this close he looks less human. He’s got this weird sort of almost-human look to him, but his face is just barely too skeletal, and his eye sockets are just barely too deep.

“You should be too well-fed to be able to see me.” he says. His voice is as strange as the rest of him, simultaneously firm and whispery.

“What does that mean?” You ask with a frown. With every moment this interaction is becoming more unsettling, but strangely you aren’t afraid.

“I…” He seems to be at a loss for words. The man whose form looks much more skeletal now than it did before leans forward, resting his elbows on the table and steepling his fingers in front of his face. “I do not think you would believe me.”

You lean back in your chair, cross your arms, and raise an eyebrow. “I grew up on the internet, I hear weird things all the time.  _Try me_.”

He barks out a laugh, and it sends an unpleasant shiver up your spine. It is not friendly, but it’s not cruel, exactly either. It’s just that suddenly every fiber of your body is screaming  _danger_  at the sound. When he schools his features once more, and looks at you, you’re afraid he is about to tell you something.

“I am Famine, one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse,” he says. He waves a gaunt hand at the horse outside. “That is my horse, and this-” he gestures to the cafe, “is how I stay busy.”

“No shit,” you say, shocked to discover that you actually believe him. You uncross your arms and lean forward. “So why does Famine own a cafe?”

“Good question.” He says, cracking a strange smile that sends shivers up your spine once more. “Spreading a little hunger keeps me full and busy, and having the cafe allows people to immediately sate their hunger, so no harm done.”

“Makes as much sense as anything else, I suppose.” You say after thinking about it for a minute.

“So,” He cocks his head and looks you over. “You should not be able to see me, and yet, here we are.”

“And yet here we are,” you echo.

You watch his face as he stares at you, and yet you could not name the color of his eyes they are vast, and both colorful and colorless. His scrutiny is deeply uncomfortable, and leaves you feeling unsettled when he simply says “hm” and looks at you, one bony finger tapping at one practically nonexistent lip.

“When is the last time you were held?” He finally asks.

“What?” You are caught off guard.

“Humans, living ones anyway, need touch. You are not starving in the traditional sense and yet… it is a hunger within you that brought you here.”

“Yeah,” you say, drawing back, rubbing your hands over your arms, and looking away. “I suppose it is.”

“I can…” He pauses, shifts uncomfortably in his seat, and then seems to force himself to continue. “My proposition is this. Humans rarely see me, and I’ve never seen one with a need that is as… deep as yours. I can offer you a night of companionship. Just one night. No strings, no ‘I want your eternal soul’ or any debts. One night, and then we are done.”

“Why?” You ask, still not quite able to look at him.

“I do not get opportunities like this… ever. And though I am not human, this body can experience pleasure.” He says, his ageless eyes still locked on your face.

“So… we have sex and that’s it?” You say, somewhat incredulous. “That sounds-”

“That is, not quite what I meant,” Famine says, cutting in. “Sex could be part of the experience, but I was more referring to a night spent experiencing physical intimacy. Starting with something more mundane and working our way up.”

“Oh,” you bite your lower lip, and seriously contemplate this, your eyes drifting to Famine, and his strangely gaunt form. “If we try this and I want to stop?”

“Then we stop.” Famine says, as if that is the most obvious answer in the world. And though you are still unsettled by his very presence, the feeling eases somewhat.

“Yeah, okay. Let’s do this then.”

Famine smiles, and rises from the table, offering you his hand.

“Please, lead the way.”

Mere minutes later you're regretting your choice.

Famine is standing in your apartment.

Famine. Is standing. In. your apartment.

You’re freaking out, to say the least.

You look around, taking stock of the various embarrassing messes, from the laundry pile that you’ve let go far too long, because it’s not like any of it smelled  _that_  bad since all you were doing was sitting around the house, to the dishes in the sink, piled a little too high since you were the only one that saw them. It’s like your whole life is laid bare, and it’s pathetic.

“If it would help,” Famine says, his firm-but-whispery voice gentle, “we can start small. I will wash the dishes. You dry them.”

“What?” You say.

“Trust me,” He says.

You’ve come this far, you decide. It would be silly to pick  _this_ as the point that makes you back away. So you lead him to the kitchen. You connect your cellphone to your bluetooth speaker, and get some music going in the background; the silence feels too intense, too weirdly intimate. Famine smiles at you, and begins washing dishes. There’s a rhythm in no time. He scrubs, rinses, and passes. You dry and stack.

And then his hand brushes yours, and there’s a mental record scratch.

Oh.

Oh this is why he wanted to do this, you realize. You start breathing again after a moment, and the look of concern on his dark face is enough for you to move again. You return to what you were doing, and the rhythm slowly returns.

The next time his hand brushes yours, you almost enjoy the sensation, and the pause while your brain reboots is much shorter. The third time is even easier. By the time the last dish is cleaned and put away, you can handle your hands touching.

“What… now?” You ask, and to your relief your voice isn’t shaking.

“What do you want to do?” He asks.

“We could…” You look around. There are some messes here and there, but in a space this small even having just cleaned the kitchen has made everything feel a bit cleaner and brighter. “How about we watch TV? Do you do that?”

He cracks a smile, and this time when he laughs it’s gentle, and doesn’t give you chills.

“I’m a fan of  _The Good Place_ ,” he offers. “But I’m not picky.”

“Let’s watch that then,” You say.

At the foot of your bed is a loveseat. It’s halfway covered in laundry. You contemplate for a moment before scooping it up into your arms and dragging it over to the laundry closet inside the bathroom. You start a load of laundry.

When you get back out, Famine is sitting at one end of the loveseat, his arm draped carefully over the back of it, one of his legs crossed over his other at the knee. He looks comfortable, if gaunt. You offer him a smile, and settle down at the far end of the loveseat from him. There’s not a ton of space, but there’s a little. He doesn’t press the issue.

You start the show on the TV. By the end of the first episode, you’ve eased close enough that you can feel the warmth of his leg where it presses to yours. By the end of the second you’re leaning against him, ever so gently. He doesn’t seem to react much, but during the third episode, his arm slowly drapes around you and hugs you a little closer.

You try to keep breathing. This is such a nice feeling, you’ve forgotten how good it is to be held by someone. The warmth of a body beside yours– though he’s more bones than flesh– and the soft sound of his breathing. You relax into him, and by the end of the episode you’ve decided that you do want more.

You pause the show, and shift so you’re straddling his lap. He looks up at you with surprise, but that quickly melts away into pleasure as you run your hands over his chest. His hands grip your hips, and you feel his fingers just barely skim up under your shirt. But he lets you set the pace, lets you give him cues, so until you ask for more, that’s all he does.

You find buttons on the dark fabric of his clothing, which is still fairly indescribable; you know you’ve seen what he’s wearing, you’ve now spent hours in his company, but you could not begin to say what he is wearing, except that it apparently has buttons. One by one, you undo the buttons, exposing gray flesh to your view. He’s got a skinny torso, though he’s not emaciated. You touch him, and he shivers, his breath catching in his throat.

You lean forward and nibble at the column of  his throat, where his skin, where it seems simultaneously bony and fleshy tempts you. He shudders, and his hands on your hips flex.

“Do you still want things slow?” He asks, his whispery voice sounding a bit ragged at the edges already.

“No,” you whisper back. “Touch me.”

He shifts his grip, holding  your butt as he takes the few steps it requires to move to the bed. He lowers you onto it, and then leans back just enough to fully disrobe his torso. You can see his bones, but when you touched him, you didn’t feel them, and when he reaches out and touches you, his hands running up under your shirt as he guides you through stripping yourself, he feels very solid and real, though he’s still so very skinny.

He starts at your feet, running his hands over your skin, stroking  you, sending crackles of electricity through your nerves at the sensation of someone else touching you. He strokes your calves, then leans in, kissing and nipping at you. He does the same to your thighs, and for a moment you hope that he’s going to move to your core next, but he passes that over, instead moving to your belly, running his hands over your skin, stroking you and just touching you.

He reaches your breasts, and takes one in each hand, teasing them, until your nipples are aching points and you’re begging for more. He teases your nipples; he flicks with his tongue, pinches them with his fingers, nips at them with his teeth, seems to take note of what makes  you moan the most because he keeps doing that until you think you might climax from that alone.

But before you can do that, Famine’s mouth is on yours, and he’s finally, finally kissing you. His tongue teases yours as his body weight presses you down into the mattress. One of his hands works its way between you, and his fingers part your folds and zero in on your clit, and you practically scream your climax into his mouth at that.

He slowly, and oh so gently gathers up the moisture that is gathering there and eases his fingers into you, stretching you a bit, but what he’s looking for is that spot, you realize, when his fingers flick in just that way. And he hits it, because of course he does. And another orgasm builds, and it’s too much too fast, but you’re rushing over the edge and you’re climaxing and also crying.

Famine seems to see that, and he realizes at the same time you do that this was too much too fast.

“What do you need?” He asks.

“I don’t know,” you admit, wiping angrily at the tears that have ruined this moment.  

“I can just hold you for a while,” he says.

You nod, and he gathers you up into his arms and pulls the blanket over you both.

“I’m sorry,” you say.

“Don’t be,” he answers.

“But-”

“No.” he interrupts. “This was nice for me in a way I can’t explain, and stopping when we did changed nothing about that. You have nothing to apologize for.”

“God,” you laugh bitterly. “How are you so kind? Why can’t I find a human like you?”

He chuckles, and squeezes you a little.

“It’s easier to be kind when it doesn’t really matter,” he says. “You’ll find someone, or you won’t, but regardless you need to take better care of yourself. I don’t want you to see me again in the future.”

“Ouch,” you say. It only stings a little, because you know seeing Famine isn’t a good thing.

“You know exactly what I mean,” He tucks your head under his chin. “Try to get some sleep. In the morning, I’ll be gone, and you shouldn’t see me again. Be happy. Be healthy. Take care of yourself.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” you grouch.

“It is,” he agrees. “Easy for me to say, and harder for you to do. But I think you needed to hear it.”

He holds you until you fall asleep, like he promised, and in the morning when you wake, he’s gone like he said he’d be. Nothing is magically fixed, and your depression isn’t gone, but it’s a little less overwhelming, and it’s nice to have clean dishes.

You drink your coffee, and you look down at the cafe across the street, and you gather up your things to work outside the apartment today.

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to a prompt at monsterkinkmeme.tumblr.com
> 
> thetravelerwrites.tumblr.com has written a beautiful epilogue for this piece as well. It's called "Famine's Lament" and is available here: https://thetravelerwrites.tumblr.com/post/183426249961/you-suffer-from-moderate-to-severe-touch


End file.
